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Considering the undressed lengths that Britney has been reaching for press coverage recently, this is not a surprising. But thanks to Alisa Miller, CEO of Public Radio International in the US, this fantastic Friday headline is now legitimately used.

In a five minute talk to the TED conference, Alisa neatly visualises the American mainstream news media coverage in February 2007. This was on the back of some research from the Pew Centre for Excellence in Journalism and their State of the News Media report.

This is the world by land mass:

And this is the map of American news coverage for February 2007, by country covered:

Seventy-nine percent of the news stories from American network media covered America. Take out the US, remaining 21% is Iraq, little else. Combined coverage of Russia, China, India: 1%. This was in the month that North Korea dismantled nuclear facilities. Indonesia suffered from mass floods. And the IPCC released its fourth assessment report.

The leading news story? The death of Anna Nicole Smith. This received ten times the coverage of IPCC report.

Why?
The American news networks have reduced their foreign bureaus by 50%. Apart from a handful of NBS bureaus in Delhi and other capitals, there are no longer American network news bureaus in Africa, India or South America. As Miller makes the point, coverage of stars such as Smith and Spears is cheaper.

Meeting the audience needs?
Of course, Britney wants the press coverage and the audience want to know about Britney. But the audience also wants to know about the IPCC, to a measured degree, and the IPCC wants the coverage. As Miller is keen to point out, in the past 20 years, the numbers of Americans who follow world news grew from 37% to 52%.

I don’t think this is any surprise to those who follow the American news media. But the images are stark, and are a useful reflection of why critics of mainstream media need to continue to hold them to account for relevance to their audience and society beyond what is cheap and easy to cover. This includes the investment in coverage of science and environmental issues.

What about the internet? New media, new democracy, surely?
Well, not according to Miller. In the Pew Centre’s analysis of the 14,000 stories that appeared on the homepage of Google News in February 2007, only 24 news events were covered. In echoes of the conclusion from Nick Davies’ anaylsis of UK media coverage being little more than rewritten AP news releases (see Flat Earth News), these 24 news events could find their way back to AP and Reuters. News as recycled media reaches a new low.

What can we do?
Maintain critical pressure on mainstream news outlets to report directly from sources, such as the IPCC. Continue to provide audience to alternative media such as Real Climate and their assessment of the IPCC, IndyMedia, and ensure that you, I have a diverse range of media sources when developing our understanding of the news agenda.

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Real Climate is pushing for a bet to be accepted by the authors of the recent ‘global cooling’ paper, published in Nature, that was picked up across our mainstream media, in some cases making the front page (e.g. The New York Times and the UK Telegraph).

Real Climate’s position is that the forecast of a global cooling period of the next ten years is wrong. And the reason why they have framed it as a bet is to increase the publicity around their corrections of the report’s forecast that was so easily picked up by journalists looking for a new angle. As one of my PR friends recently said, journalists in London feel the green issue has been ‘done to death’ (well, that comes in a couple of generations, when we’re outposted on the high peask of our submerged island).

So along comes a report saying ‘the world will stop warming for the next 10 years’ and the headlines are made. Real Climate’s reason for framing this as a bet (supported by a number of comments) is:

Mainly because we were concerned by the global media coverage which made it appear as if a coming pause in global warming was almost a given fact, rather than an experimental forecast. This could backfire against the whole climate science community if the forecast turns out to be wrong. Even today, the fact that a few scientists predicted a global cooling in the 1970s is still used to undermine the credibility of climate science

Edward Greisch comments on the Real Climate article, and it’s worth reading in full, but it struck a chord with some of the things I have been thinking and teaching: that the environment is now the critical issue of our generation, and rather than journalists write about the environment, they need to put the environment in everything they write. To make sure it is well informed, as Greisch puts it:

All bachelors level degrees, including journalism and English, should require the engineering and science core curriculum. Journalists do the journalism thing to sell papers. The journalism thing is exactly the wrong thing to do when reporting science.  RealClimate needs to be read by the whole world.

I agree. And with falling newspaper readerships around the world (particularly Western countries) you’d think, or hope, it would be more likely. But with a move to gathering news online, or an end to news gathering among younger generations, there is more likelihood that Real Climate will remain read by those keenly interested and committed to the issue, rather than the wider populations that the big brands of journalism reach, and will probably continue to reach, albeit in different forms from today’s dead trees or analogue broadcasts. Which is why placing environmental issues at the heart of critical education is immensely important.

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Its essay time. And the proactive students are asking questions of the lecturers here (at Sunderland University) that I feel are useful for a wider audience. One particularly pertinent question (to me, to an article in the LRB I only got to read recently) was one of the recurring themes of journalism: is it a craft with skills best learnt in practice on the job, or is it a profession like law or accountancy: requiring formal education?

There’s been quite a bit of debate around this recently. This is one example of a discussion on the topic but Neil Macintosh, Roy Greenslade and Charlie Beckett have also been weighing in on their blogs. But whether or not journalism is a profession rests on whether or not you believe the journalist must be critical and self-aware of the impact of her actions. Continue reading »

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The UK tabloids and US broadsheets were both in the news this week for their poor coverage of climate change. Poor in either volume (US) or tone and accuracy (UK).

In the UK, The Guardian picked up on new research carried out by Max Boykoff and Maria Mansfield at the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute, reporting on the coverage of climate change in the tabloid press (.PDF). They analysed 974 articles published between 2000 and 2006 in the Sun, Daily Mail, Daily Express and Daily Mirror, and found that:

UK tabloid coverage significantly diverged from the scientific consensus that humans contribute to climate change. Moreover, there was no consistent increase in the percentage of accurate coverage throughout the period of analysis and across all tabloid newspapers.

 

Findings from interviews indicate that inaccurate reporting may be linked to the lack of specialist journalists in the tabloid press. (Boykoff and Mansfield, 2008)

These are in line with findings in another paper, by Neil Gavin at the University of Liverpool, presented at the Political Studies Association conference in Bristol, September 2007. Gavin found a similar paucity of content in the tabloids, which was, again in line with Boykoff and Mansfield, that tabloid coverage has been consistently low over the period. It’s worth a closer look at the issue… Continue reading »

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I’m not holding it together very well today. Natural personal sensitivities aside, I’ve this morning read James Risbey’s excellent paper: “The new climate discourse: Alarmist or alarming?” published in the peer-reviewed Global Environmental Change, (Issue 18: 2008, pages 26-37). It is, well, alarming.

A quick summary. The papers asks: is the discourse that talks of climate change as ‘catastrophic’, ‘rapid’, ‘irreversible’, ‘worse than we thought’ etc. either alarmist rhetoric, or is it in line with the actual science? Risbey’s analysis finds that these terms, used by NGOs, green activists, politicians and scientific spokespersons to urge for action (and reported in the media as such), are not exaggerated rhetoric or over-the-top; they are in fact in line with scientific consensus. It is worth taking one example in some detail. Continue reading »

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My new local newspaper, the Sunderland Echo, is inviting readers to write its headlines in its own version of networked journalism. Networked journalism, as I’ve writen about before, is the collaborative development of the ‘newswork’ that brings the traditional media institutions closer to the citizen journalists, or produsers, who are seeking out and taking new opportunities to participate in media, rather than just consume it. Here it’s just for fun, as reported on Holdthefrontpage.co.uk:

Every Friday morning [Magic] radio presenter and Echo columinst Steve Colman gives listeners a teaser from one of the day’s stories and challenges them to compose a witty and fitting headline. So far the scores stand at 11 to 8 in favour of the radio listeners.

The Sunderland Echo also runs an OnCampus page, where it publishes stories gleaned from the journalism programme of Sunderland University - another example or facet of networked journalism, where the content comes from citizen produsers, even if they are a little further along the spectrum than the ‘out-there blogger’.

What is also good to remember from this example is the cross-media networks that still play an important role in the marketing and audience development strategies of the mainstream news media. When I worked for the internet arm of GWR Radio back in 2000, the buzz then was of the cross-promotional benefits of radio and web working together; it was also the buzz for the BBC, particularly programmes such as Newsnight, which was benefitting from cross-promotion across BBC News 24, BBC.co.uk and the radio.

And while we don’t think so excitedly about the ‘buzz’ any more, as in the Sunderland Echo example, the intra-networks of journalism remain just as important as the extra-networks, as illustrated by this article in The Observer last week, on BBC news coming together. As newsroom chief Peter Horrocks says, the integration is meant to provide a more coherent overview for news production within the BBC to meet the demands of the digital age. It’s also, as is made clear, about cost-savings, and some people think it’s a bad move.

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In a New York Times Dot Earth post on ‘Climate and the Web’, author Andy Revkin reflects on how digital media and culture can contribute to the tackling of climate change. But the article continues to support the journalistic norm of reporting with ‘balance’ which, in the case of climate change, distorts the real and certain consensus on the role of humans in creating the crisis.

The Dot Earth blog is a leap forward in climate coverage in the US elite mainstream press. These are the top four newspapers of the NYTimes, Washington Post, LA Times and Wall Street Journal that Boykoff & Boykoff call the “Prestige Press” in their paper ‘Balance as Bias’ (2004), published in the peer-reviewed journal Global Environmental Change. Andy Revkin’s blog is clear, concise, and mainly constructive in its communication of the impact of human behaviour on greehouse gases emitted into the atmosphere, and its dangerous consequences. So, I believe Andy in this sense is doing a good job.

However, while Andy and his publisher the NYTimes.com are “conducting an experiment” to deconstruct Bush’s most recent speech on climate change, I think Andy is also contributing to the phenomenon of informational ‘balance as bias’ that Boykoff & Boykoff identified in their 2004 paper.

The ‘balance as bias’ argument is one that shows how the journalistic norm of the balanced reporting of two sides of a particular issue is problematic when one side is so overwhelmingly supported by the factual and scientific consensus, and when the other side is hugely lacking in the same level of scientific fact and peer-reviewed consensual agreement. And in regards to climate change, in the words of James Baker at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “[t]here’s a better scientific consensus on this than on any issue I know - except maybe Newton’s second law of dynamics.”

Providing equal attention to the two sides in this case (and Boykoff and Boykoff’s research over a 14 year period from 1988-2002 showed that 53% of articles gave ‘roughly equal attention’ to both sides) is a hugely disproportionate response to the actual peer-reviewed scientific support for the ’sceptical’ view. So why do U.S. journalists keep doing this? Continue reading »

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Yesterday I talked through the different aspects of ‘citizen journalism’ and ‘networked journalism’ with my social media class (first PR students, then journalists). As I’ve already expressed, ‘networked journalism’ is I believe the more important for the future survival of the mainstream news industry. It also comes as a relief for the old institutions (as long as they change) becuse it communicates a model, fast being implemented (for example by OhMyNews in Korea) that retains the institution at the centre of the ‘newswork’ (the production of the objects of news, that makes up the news agenda).

‘Networked journalism’, well summarized by Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine.com, was discussed by Jo Bardoel and Mark Deuze in their article ‘Network Journalism’ published in the Australian Journalism Review (23.3) back in 2001. Mark Deuze’s more recent article ‘Preparing for an Age of Participatory News’ (Journalism Practice 2007 (1.3)) quotes Jarvis, who has the talent for the turn of phrase, describing networked journalism as the process that:

“takes into account the collaborative nature of journalism now: professionals and amateurs working together to get the real story, linking to each other across brands and old boundaries to share facts, questions, answers, ideas, perspectives.”
Jeff Jarvis, Buzzmachine.com (2006)

And the UK regional market is a seedbed of some of the best pioneering work in this area. For example, the Birmingham Post sourcing its lead story from its army of bloggers. Or the Glasgow Evening Times launching a third wave of community sites on the base of its successful forays into the ultra-local.

The model is a hybrid one, where journalists no longer need only to be connected to their traditional sources and influencers (politicians, organisations, media, police, PR, local government) and then, top-down, communicate the selected stories to the audience. Journalists now also need to be connected, from the bottom-up, to the audience, who are now part of the ‘newswork’, or who Deuze called the ‘produsers’ (the users turned producers).

Is this an attempt by the mainstream news industry to protect its gatekeeper role from the masses? Yes, and I’m not a big fan of rhetorical questions like that, so I’ll try to use them less. Yes, the best innovators in newsrooms and new journalism entrepreneurs (not citizen journalists, but business women and men) are building upon the ways that new media is allowing for a new form of journalism: one where the consumer group plays a more participatory role in the creation of the ‘newswork’ and news agenda. And that sense of a news business is important. Networked journalism is a way to, as Deuze indicates, re-connect with the news audience and as such re-commercialise the news product.

An important finding from Deuze’s paper should also provide relief for the editors and publishers at places such as The Sun and the Independent alike. That’s because networked citizens, produsers, do not want to replace Robert Fisk or Kate Adie as producers of serious news. They want more lifestyle enterainment. As Deuze shows, ‘produsers’:

“come to citizen journalism not to correct the ‘hard’ news of the mainstream itself, but to correct for mainstream journalism’s bias towards ‘hard’ news itself, by adding a greater amount of ‘soft’ news (celebrity, entertainment, local lifestyle.”
Mark Deuze (2007)

As my students said, we want the news provided to us by our trusted sources. They did sound a bit like John Reith, first director general of the BBC (”Few know what they want, and very few want what they need” quoted in Hermida, 2008), but, paternalism aside, we do, as consumers, like choices being made for us. Whether or not that is a good thing is the debate: according to Deuze, what we want when we participate is the ’soft’ news, not the politics or economics, or, arguably, the news about climate change, the environment, the food crisis… Hmmm…. Sounds like a less appealing development after all.

But back to citizen journalism. Hopefully networked or particpatory journalism will become the industry term and model that we talk about when thinking of successful growth and new jobs. I agree with Deuze when he says:

“Indeed, the common use of ‘citizen journalism’ as a blanket term for such news publishing models [citizen journalist contributors and editorial oversight on sites] to some extent obscures the significant differences in approach between the various participatory news websites currently in operation.”
Mark Deuze (2007)

And citizen journalism remains the term for the millions of blogs that remain out there and publishing, but ‘un-networked’ to mainstream media.

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Citizen journalism is the process by which the group (formerly known as the audience) plays an active role in news and information gathering, reporting, editing and dissemination. Here’s the definition from Wikipedia. It is the process by which people like you and me, outside of official media institutions (e.g. The Times, BBC), start up blogs, post images to Flickr and videos to Youtube, and begin to change the debate by providing access to stories that remain untold by those ‘official media institutions’. Talking of which, this video is entertaining…

But even though the term ‘citizen journalism’ is barely out of its nappy, is it being replaced with the idea and ideal of ‘networked journalism’? The idea of networked journalism focuses not on citizens replacing or sitting alongside journalists as the providers of news; rather, the future of journalism looks to be a future based on the networks of citizens-and-journalists working together. Here are a couple of posts on this topic:

Citizen-journalism start-ups are doomed by John Ndege, founder of Scribblesheet, a citizn journalism site that recently folded due to the inability to find a working financial model.

Networked Journalism by Jeff Jarvis on Buzzmachine.com

Breaking news social media tool for journalists by Robert Hamman, BBC Blogs editor

Sue Robinson’s article in the October 2007 edition of Journalism Practice, entitled ‘Someone’s Gotta Be in Control Here’, illustrates through interviews with 35 editors (in the US) this ‘networked journalism’ at work. One of the best examples is from the Nola.com experiences during Hurricane Katrina, where the forums became not only places for relatives to find each other in the chaos, but places where journalists worked with citizens to tease out the most important stories, and aspects of those stories, for publication, investigation and lead prominence in the print and digital editions of the news. As one editor told Robinson, “journalists and their audiences” were now “disjointed families”. (314)

I’m pleased. One, because we all know what citizen journalism is and no-one has ever really been settled on the idea; and I think networked journalism is more interesting and a more realistic snapshot of the future. I’m not the only one. The decision of the Press Gazette to launch its Citizen Journalism Awards drew a fair bit of criticism, for four key reasons, and mostly around what they were called:

Broadly, there are four objections to the term “citizen journalism”. One objects to the word “journalism”; another objects to the word “citizen”. In between are two objections that the common usage of the term does not overlap with its empirical reality. One says the use of the phrase is overbroad; the other says that it is too narrow.

Read more at the original article.

I’m teaching this as part of the Web Log - web writing module at Sunderland, as part of its Journalism & PR programme. As well as being a term that feels more grounded and more professional, for all those who participate in or experience the development of journalism and information dissemination via the new technologies at hand; it’s also, I’d argue, more interesting for PR students, as the creation of the news agenda has always been about a network of journalists, editors, PR, marketers, business, audience, etc…

Robinson’s article goes on to make the point that it is not just the audience - journalist relationship that is now networked. That model suffices for the means by which the journalist works: “the good reporters are going to be the ones who want to tell a story using all the tools available to them” - i.e., they are going to be the bloggers, the video creators, the podcasters. In other words, the successful journalists are going to be the ones that adopt the practices that we are calling ‘citizen journalism’. As such, what I believe is:

not that concerned citizens are becoming more like journalists; it is that journalists are becoming more like concerned citizens.

Citizen journalism is dead. Long live networked journalism.

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The Roger Pielke Sr. Research Group News (ClimateSci.org; one of Nature magazine’s Top 50 Science Blogs) has reported what it considers to be a case of bias against its research by EOS, the online publication of AGU, a “a worldwide scientific community that advances, through unselfish cooperation in research, the understanding of Earth and space for the benefit of humanity”.

The allegation is the result of the refusal to publish their article, based on a survey of climate scientists, that suggests “there is not a universal agreement among climate scientists about climate science as represented in the IPCC’s WG1“.

The results of the ClimateSci.org survey, of 140 climate scientists, reported these results:

• No scientists were willing to admit to the statement that global warming is a fabrication and that human activity is not having any significant effect on climate [0%].
• In total, 18% responded that the IPCC AR4 WG1 Report probably overstates the role of CO2, or exaggerates the risks implied by focusing on CO2-dominated Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), to a greater or lesser degree.
• A further 17% expressed the opinion that the Report probably underestimates or seriously underestimates the consequences of anthropogenic CO2 -induced AGW and that the associated risks are more severe than is implied in the report.
• The remaining 65% expressed some degree of concurrence with the report’s science basis

ClimateSci.org then tried to get this published in EOS, and Nature Precedings. They were turned down by both.

How should an environmental journalist respond to this? Continue reading »

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